New CLE Course from the Legal Tech Institute: Harris County Law Library Tech @ 2:00 pm on Thursday, January 24, 2019

We at the Harris County Law Library recently announced the publication of our Legal Tech Institute 2019 Course Catalog, which includes five new programs on a variety of legal tech topics. The first new class, Harris County Law Library Tech, will be offered this Thursday at 2:00 pm the Law Library’s Legal Tech Lab. Texas attorneys will earn 1.0 hour free CLE credit for attending.

For details and to register, please visit the Hands-on Legal Tech Training Events page. While you’re there, take a look at additional upcoming programs including the following:

• Digital Legal Research Refresher

• Fastcase & Casemaker

• Microsoft Excel for Legal Work

• Android for Legal Work

The Harris County Law Library offers Hands-on Legal Tech Training every Thursday at 2:00 pm in the Law Library’s Legal Tech Lab. A number of other learning opportunities are available, including on-demand CLE videos, which can be viewed at any time from the comfort of your home or office.

We hope to see you this Thursday, January 24, 2019, at 2:00 pm for Harris County Law Library Tech!

Neglect of .govs Impacts Consumer Safety and Privacy During Government Shutdown

January is Consumer Law Resources Month at the Harris County Law Library. Consumer law research materials from our print collection are on display throughout the library until the end of the month. In particular, we are featuring titles from the National Consumer Law Center as well as self-help sources published by Nolo. Topics run the gamut from product liability and food safety to financial market transparency and identity protection.

With consumer law occupying our thoughts this month, we were naturally drawn to the headlines in recent days (see below) announcing the potential for compromised consumer safety during the federal government shutdown, now entering its 25th day.

• Consumer protection services falter during government shutdown (The Daily Dot)

• Consumer protection websites are down due to the government shutdown (The Verge)

As reported by the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, BBC, the Washington Post, and several other news organizations, a potentially increasing number of .gov websites are now blocked or completely inaccessible due to the inability of individual government agencies to renew their HTTPS security certificates. Tech Crunch explains:

Every time your browser lights up with “HTTPS” in green or flashes a padlock, it’s a TLS certificate encrypting the connection between your computer and the website, ensuring nobody can intercept and steal your data or modify the website. But TLS certificates are notoriously delicate things. Certificates expire — a common mistake as people often forget to renew them. Depending on the security level, most websites will kick back browser errors while other sites won’t let you in at all until the expired certificate is renewed. Except in this case, they can’t — because there’s nobody there to buy and install a new certificate

Websites affected by the shutdown include the US Department of Justice, the Courts of Appeals, and NASA. Also impacted is the Federal Trade Commission, which helps protect consumers from identity theft and scams by offering free credit reports and maintaining the “Do Not Call” registry. As a consequence of the shutdown, the Washington Post reports, a surge in robo-calls has already begun. Neither DoNotCall.gov nor IdentityTheft.gov is currently operational, thus reducing privacy protections and preventing victims from reporting their stolen personal and financial information.

As the shutdown continues, more website certificates will expire. This will expose the unprotected sites to vulnerabilities that hackers may exploit to gather data on citizen-consumers who, during periods of full government funding, enjoy the protections of the regulatory agencies operating in the best interest of all Americans.

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Image credit: https://media.threatpost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/103/2019/01/11104051/tls-1.png

For a full history of all 20 previous federal government shutdowns dating back to 1976, take a look at this timeline from Vox, and for a humorous take on many of the government agency shutdown notices, ranked from panicked to indifferent, click here to get the rundown from Quartz.

Finally, don’t forget that the Law Library of Congress is operational, and access to this beginner’s guide to consumer protection is a great place to start your consumer law research.

Free CLE at the Harris County Law Library - Blending Your Legal Research

The Harris County Law Library will offer the latest installment of its Legal Tech Institute Lecture Series on January 17, 2019 at 12:00 pm. The presenters, Amy Small, Assistant Director of the Texas State Law Library, and Joseph Lawson, Deputy Director of the Harris County Law Library, will discuss strategies for using free and low cost legal research sources effectively. Attendees will learn to approach legal research systematically, utilizing free resources available online, including the e-books and legal databases in the Texas State Law Library’s digital collection. Presenters will also discuss how to use Westlaw and Lexis Advance, which can be accessed for free on site at the Harris County Law Library.

To enroll in this course, please visit the Blending Your Legal Research registration page. Look for other Legal Tech Institute programs, including the Hands-on Legal Tech Training classes offered every Thursday at 2:00 pm in our Legal Tech Lab in the Law Library. Our 2019 Course Catalog has just been published and is now available via the Legal Tech Institute online.

New Video CLE: Fulfilling Ethical Obligations with Legal Research

The Legal Tech Institute at the Harris County Law Library has released a new video CLE. Fulfilling Ethical Obligations with Legal Research is the latest additional to our Learn On-Demand CLE library that lets you earn CLE credit in Texas while staying up to date on legal tech. Visit the Law Library's Legal Tech Institute page for more legal tech learning opportunities.

Robot Justice

In Steven Spielberg’s 2001 movie, AI Artificial Intelligence, scientists program a robotic boy to understand and express a full range of human emotions, including love. The boy is adopted into a family as a test case where he learns to connect with the couple who become his parents. After a series of unexpected events, the family’s living arrangement becomes unsustainable. The mother begins to fear the boy and abandons him in the woods, consigning him to an uncertain fate. The boys sets out to navigate a complex world where he’s neither fully human nor fully machine.

Fast forward thousands of years to a time when alien life forms have arrived on planet Earth. Here, they discover the body of the robotic boy at the bottom of a frozen river and seek to reverse engineer his design. This quasi-human creation is their only connection to the Earthling inhabitants who preceded them, and they wish to understand his emotions. He was programmed by humans, they reason, so traces of their humanness still exist within his code.

In addition to film’s impressive special effects, its evocative music, and the spectrum of feelings it inspires, this movie also teaches a lesson: software bears the marks of the people who write the code. All of the assumptions, biases, and predetermined social perspectives that we possess get baked in to the algorithms, creating smart machines that lack the objectivity we expect them to exhibit. They inherit our prejudices and act accordingly. Nowhere is this being discussed more widely, it seems, than in the application of AI to the law. The articles listed here, found in popular magazines and journals, describe various ways that AI is being used — and misused — to predict crime, sentence offenders, and determine the likelihood of criminal recidivism. They also explore the limits of AI, the ethics of using AI to mete out justice, and the regulations that some are proposing to counteract the harmful effects of machine bias.

• Artificial Intelligence is Now Used to Predict Crime. But is it Biased? (Smithsonian)

• Can Crime Be Predicted by an Algorithm? from Hello World by Hannah Fry (Penguin)

• Bias Detectives: The Researchers Striving to Make Algorithms Fair (Nature)

• Machine Bias: Risk Assessments in Criminal Sentencing (ProPublica)

• We Need an FDA for Algorithms (Nautilus)

• What Does a Fair Algorithm Look Like? (Wired)

• AI Research is in Desperate Need of an Ethical Watchdog (Wired)

• One State’s Bail Reform Exposes the Promise and Pitfalls of Tech-Driven Justice (Wired)

• Courts Are Using AI to Sentence Criminals. That Must Stop Now. (Wired)

• Management AI: Bias, Criminal Recidivism, And the Promise of Machine Learning (Forbes)

• Trust but Verify: A Guide to Algorithms and the Law (Harvard Journal of Law & Technology)

• [VIDEO] The Truth About Algorithms (Aeon)